Wednesday, April 3, 2013

It's A Contest And The American People Lose

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) seems to be in a contest with Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) to see who can make the most ignorant, most inane comment regarding firearms.

Rep. McCarthy is famous for response that a barrel shroud on a semi-automatic rifle or carbine is "a shoulder thing that goes up." Yesterday at a public forum held by the Denver Post on gun control, Rep. DeGette launched into a disquisition on standard capacity magazine that illustrated merely one thing - she doesn't have a clue about what she is talking about nor what legislation on which she is the lead co-sponsor would ban.

Asked how a ban on magazines holding more than 15 rounds would be effective in reducing gun violence, DeGette said:

“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”

It is a shame that Larimer County Sheriff Justin Justin Smith who was sitting next to her at the forum didn't just take out a spare magazine, start unloading the cartridges, and then reload them. That would have said just about everything. As it was, the crowd just chuckled after her remarks.

A spokeswoman trying to deflect well-deserved ridicule and criticism made things worse in an issued statement, calling it “political gamesmanship” by “opponents of common-sense gun violence prevention trying to manipulate the facts to distract from the critical issue of keeping our children safe and keeping killing machines out of the hands of disturbed individuals.

“The Congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years, and has been deeply involved in the issue,” Juliet Johnson said. “She simply misspoke in referring to ‘magazines’ when she should have referred to ‘clips,’ which cannot be reused because they don’t have a feeding mechanism."